Qwant: French Search Engine, QwantBot and AI Answers

Qwant is a French search engine. Its crawler QwantBot builds the Qwant index, and Qwant’s AI answers summarize pages from that index with links to them as sources. If you want to appear in Qwant, allow QwantBot. Blocking QwantBot removes your site from Qwant search, not only from its AI answers.

How Qwant builds its index

The Qwant help article How Qwant indexes the web describes the process:

1. QwantBot finds new pages through links and sitemap files.
2. QwantBot reads robots.txt and downloads pages that return HTTP 200.
3. Qwant scores each page for quality. Pages that pass go into the index.

Qwant indexes HTML pages, PDF files, office documents and plain text. It does not index pages behind a login, pages blocked in robots.txt or pages with a noindex tag. It also skips content that needs complex rendering in the browser.

Qwant also uses other sources. Its legal page on ranking, last updated in December 2023, says that some results come from third-party services, such as the Microsoft Bing API. That page names the older crawler family “Qwantify”. In August 2025, Qwant and Ecosia started to serve queries from Staan, an index built by their joint company, European Search Perspective (TechCrunch). Qwant said that it uses Staan for some features, such as AI summaries.

How Qwant AI answers use your pages

Qwant has two AI features, as described in The sources and data used by Qwant’s AI:

Feature	Sources
Flash Answer	A summary above the results for some factual questions. It uses results from the Qwant index and links to the pages it used.
AI Chat	Uses the Qwant index and shows sources when available. It can also use the general knowledge of the model.

Users can turn off Flash Answers in their settings. Qwant says that it can use third-party language models and lists its partners on about.qwant.com.

Qwant and AI training data says that Qwant does not use indexed content to train its own models. It uses your pages only for search results and for AI answers that cite your site with a link.

QwantBot user agent

Every QwantBot user agent contains the word Qwantbot. Qwant gives this format in The Qwant bot and the robots.txt file:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Qwantbot{-news}/X.Y_{worker_id}; +https://help.qwant.com/bot/)

The parts in braces are optional. -news marks the bot for Qwant News, and worker_id identifies the machine. Two examples:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Qwantbot/1.0_12345; +https://help.qwant.com/bot/)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Qwantbot-news/2.0; +https://help.qwant.com/bot/)

The older name Qwantify

Older Qwant user agents contain the name Qwantify instead of Qwantbot. The community list crawler-user-agents records strings such as this one:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Qwantify/Bleriot/1.2.1; +https://help.qwant.com/bot)

The current QwantBot help page does not use the name Qwantify. If your robots.txt has rules for Qwantify, add the same rules for Qwantbot.

Block or limit QwantBot

QwantBot follows the robots exclusion standard. Put robots.txt at the root of each subdomain. To block the whole site:

User-agent: Qwantbot
Disallow: /

To make QwantBot wait 8 seconds between requests:

User-agent: Qwantbot
Crawl-delay: 8

Qwant says that blocking QwantBot removes your site from Qwant results. Qwant does not document a separate opt-out for AI answers. If you want to remove one page from results, use <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> instead.

Identify real QwantBot requests

1. Do a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address. The host name must end in qwant.com.
2. Do a forward DNS lookup on that host name. Make sure that it returns the same IP address.

You can also compare the IP address with the qwantbot.json list that the QwantBot help page links to. Qwant takes reports about crawler problems at [email protected].